As the Brits say, "here here". Well done. Bookshare may want to think
about all the technical know how out here. Also about the good will which
might be used to procure grants for things actually requiring money.
E.
At 10:46 PM 4/18/2006, you wrote:
Jake, I can see how you would think that revamping Bookshare would cost a lot of money. Would you consider an alternate point of view? I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on what I have to say. You are a strong member of Bookshare, and I wonder if you would be open to sharing some of these ideas with the staff at some point since you work with them sometimes. My post is intended to spark creativity, and to say that we have more options than seem to be on the table. <smile> I am frustrated, but I'm feeling that way because I see actions that can be taken in a matter of hours to drastically improve the Bookshare service for all of us without financial cost to Bookshare.
I would like to point out to you that not all of the engineering issues would cost Bookshare money. In fact, 3 out of my top five could be done by you, me, or any other person with a little HTML knowledge. Since this is a nonprofit organization, active Bookshare volunteers could even help to implement some of these over the summer. These things don't really require money. They require time and attention to detail. I will admit that some of the big things would require money, but there's no excuse for fixing some of these no-cash things. They could make life much easier for all of us, including the staff. since you asked about the top 5 engineering improvements...
1. If Bookshare is going to grow, I think this one is urgent like a house on fire. Fix the volunteer application form so that it terminates correctly and completes the application process correctly. It currently leaves active Bookshare members who apply to volunteer in limbo, dumping them out at a screen saying they're already a member and can't register to be a volunteer. No email is sent to the volunteers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx address, and no feedback is given so that the user is notified that his application has been basically tossed into the ether. (Please note that this is HTML code that any web developer worth a darn could do in less than a day.) We are losing lots of valuable volunteers each month because of the lack of a web page.
2. Implement ftp protocol for book submissions and validations.
3. Add correctly codeed standards compliant form tags to the book submission and step 2 upload pages so they read correctly in almost all screen access software. Again, this doesn't require advanced programming to do.
4. Create a php file to update and publish a list of books that are currently in the admin queue so no one has to guess who has a book and where it is. That can be automated with some php scripts so that no one has to manually publish a list. This does not cost money for new equipment. It just takes some time and attention.
5. Bookshare volunteers need an easy and accurate way to see how much credit they have earned in a given year and should be able to transfer part or all of their credit to someone else. This would need to be done with an SQL database, and they can handle this with reliable open-source solutions.
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